The New York Times, February 29, 2020: For Seoul’s Poor, Class Strife in ‘Parasite’ Is Daily Reality
The sunlight peeks into Kim Ssang-seok’s home for just half an hour a day. When he opens his only window and looks up, he sees the wheels of passing cars. Kim dries his clothes and shoes in the sunless inside because of thieves outside. He wages a constant battle against cockroaches and the sewer smell emanating from the low-ceilinged, musty space that is his toilet and laundry room.
In Seoul, where housing prices have been rising fast, many students and young couples start out renting in a banjiha, with the hope that enough striving and toil will eventually lead to homeownership in an apartment tower.
“It’s clearly a basement but people living there want to believe they belong to the above-the-ground world,” the director of “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho, said last year at a news conference with South Korean media after his film was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. “They live with constant fear that if things get any worse, they will be completely swallowed underground.”
